When Microsoft released Windows 8, a lot of users were disappointed with the lack of built-in games. Microsoft did release a collection of modern Xbox card games based on the classic Microsoft Solitaire and Freecell. However, a lot of people weren’t impressed with the deep integration with Xbox and the online gameplay. The Microsoft Solitaire Collection stills exist in Windows 10, and it is possible to install the Windows 7 Game Space Cadet Pinball on Windows 10 however, if you’re like me and enjoy the classic old school card games and others like Minesweeper, Mahjong Titans, and Purble Place, we have an unofficial third-party solution for you.

Use simple utilities to install Windows 11 on any PC.

WingetUI: A better UI for your package managers

The main goal of this project is to create an intuitive GUI for the most common CLI package managers for Windows 10 and Windows 11, such as Winget, Scoop, Chocolatey, Pip and Npm With this app, you'll be able to easily download, install, update and uninstall any software that's published on the supported package managers — and so much more.

As useful as the Windows 10 context menu is, there are aspects of its design we sought to improve in Windows 11.

• The most common commands – cut, copy, paste, delete, and rename – are far from the mouse pointer, touch point, or pen.
• The menu is exceptionally long. It has grown in an unregulated environment for 20 years, since Windows XP, when IContextMenu was introduced.
• It includes commands which are rarely used.
• Commands that should be grouped together – such as Open and Open with – are sometimes far apart.
• Commands added by apps have no common organizational schema and can interrupt sections of inbox commands.
• Commands added by apps are not attributable to the app itself.

Ive had to manually reset and stage profile/application setup for at least 100 computers this year, and the most time efficient thing I found was winget import to auto install a large number of apps, import default app associations by xml, and liberal use of cmd. //

Breaking the right-click context menu for files is so annoying. To get to any of the actual installed things that hooked into the right click menu, I've got to click "Show More Options" every... single... time...
Run this from an admin command prompt and then reboot:

reg add HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32 /ve /d "" /f

This will restore the proper right-click context menu -- something that Microsoft never should have changed in the first place.

And that is the big problem that can't be emphasized enough: Windows 11 is a gigantic pile of stupid, pointless changes. Dozens of things changed for no good reason, and each one of them just making things a little bit worse. //

For what it's worth, you can disable most of this via Windows Settings-->System-->Notifications. Scroll to the bottom and uncheck everything under Additional settings. //

To set up a local account instead of being forced through signing up with a Microsoft one, press shift-F10 as soon as you go through the OOBE. This will being up a command prompt (which may not have focus 🙄). In the command prompt, type in

oobe\bypassnro

Hit enter and your computer will reboot. After the reboot you will now be able to say you don't have an internet connection and you will able to create a local account instead. //

You can also hold the Shift key while you right-click to skip directly to the legacy right-click context menu, instead of clicking the "Show More" button. //

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID

Right-click the blank area in the right portion of the window and select New > Key, then paste {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} as the key name.

Next, right-click on {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} in the Registry Editor sidebar and select New > Key. Then name the new key InprocServer32 .

Next, right-click on {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} in the Registry Editor sidebar and select New > Key. Then name the new key InprocServer32 .

After that, close Registry Editor and restart your Windows 11 PC.

You can also hold the Shift key while you right-click to skip directly to the legacy right-click context menu, instead of clicking the "Show More" button. //

Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\CLASSES\CLSID

Right-click the blank area in the right portion of the window and select New > Key, then paste {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} as the key name.

Next, right-click on {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} in the Registry Editor sidebar and select New > Key. Then name the new key InprocServer32 .

Next, right-click on {86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2} in the Registry Editor sidebar and select New > Key. Then name the new key InprocServer32 .

After that, close Registry Editor and restart your Windows 11 PC.

Windows Secure Time Seeding resets clocks months or years off the correct time. //

Microsoft’s repeated refusal to engage with customers experiencing these problems means that for the foreseeable future, Windows will by default continue to automatically reset system clocks based on values that remote third parties include in SSL handshakes. Further, it means that it will be incumbent on individual admins to manually turn off STS when it causes problems.

I did the same (ntfsresize + fdisk) while installing linux, and ran into the same problem. Eventually, this seems to work, from the Windows recovery prompt:

 fixboot /scanos

it found c:\windows, then I ran:

 bcdboot c:\windows

I also ran chkdsk c:, fixboot /mbr and bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled no before that, but I do not think they are related to the problem.

As far as I understand, the bcdboot command above, added the option of booting to the new c:\windows for bootmgfw.efi. Indeed, after rebooting I had two options:

1. the new "windows 10, on partition 3", which worked, and

2. "windows 10", which did not (as before).

Once booted, I removed the non-working option from the configuration manager (search "configuration manager", tab "boot").

Retro-computing fans can download the final updates released for '90s-era OSes.

What you need to do is create a shortcut. Right-click a blank area on the desktop and go to New > Shortcut.

In the wizard that opens, click in the box underneath Type the location of the item, and enter the following:

Shutdown /r /fw /t 1

If you’re not familiar with these commands, /r means restart, /fw means boot to firmware (aka the BIOS) and /t introduces a delay in seconds before the restart begins. In our example above, that’s one second.

Call this new shortcut Restart to BIOS. Right-click your new shortcut on the desktop and select Properties. Click the Advanced button.

In the Properties box, tick the Run as administrator box and click on OK a couple of times to close the windows.

Windows saves all the usernames and passwords in the Credential Manager. To remove the cached network password and username, you have to remove the network share entry from the Credential Manager.
Follow these steps to remove network credentials from the Credential Manager.

1. Open Start.
2. Search and open “Control Panel“.
3. Set “View by” on top right corner to “Large icons” to see all control panel items.
4. Click on the “Credential Manager” option.
5. After opening the Credential Manager, select the “Windows Credentials” tab within it.
6. Here, click on the Network Share password you want to delete.
7. From the credential options, click the “Remove” link.
8. Click “Yes” in the confirmation/warning window to confirm that you would like to remove the cached network password from the credential manager.

That is it. As soon as you click yes and confirm the action, Windows will remove network credentials. When you try to log into the network share, you will be again prompted for the username and password. If you select the Remember option, Windows will store the network share login details in the Credential Manager.

It has never been too hard for someone with the right amount of time, desperation, or flexible scruples to get around Windows XP's activation scheme. And yet XP activation, the actual encrypted algorithm, loathed since before it started, has never been truly broken, at least entirely offline. Now, far past the logical end of all things XP, the solution exists, floating around the web's forum-based backchannels for months now.

On the blog of tinyapps.org (first spotted by The Register), which provides micro-scale, minimalist utilities for constrained Windows installations, a blog post appropriately titled "Windows XP Activation: GAME OVER" runs down the semi-recent history of folks looking to activate Windows XP more than 20 years after it debuted, nine years after its end of life, and, crucially, some years after Microsoft turned off its online activation servers (or maybe they just swapped certificates). //

Most people won't actually, hopefully need this tool. Fully functional XP images that you can sandbox inside a virtual machine exist in many places, including Microsoft's own Windows XP Mode for Windows 7. And, of course, installing a highly unsupported XP on a device that's connected to the modern Internet is malice aforethought. Let us all enjoy this for the rhetorical, mathematical victory that it is while we say a small prayer for those dealing with hardware that truly needs XP.

From that article:
Microsoft says that Insider Program PCs that didn't meet Windows 11's minimum requirements "had 52% more kernel mode crashes" than PCs that did and that "devices that do meet the system requirements had a 99.8% crash-free experience."

So... 0.2% experienced crashes. 52% more is 0.3%. So 99.7% had a crash-free experience without the new features. I suspect it's mostly about locking everything down. Heck, looking at StatCounter's Windows version stats the share of Win7 only fell below 10% in 2023 even though support ended in 2020. Use of Win11 is only 20% today. Clearly nobody's rushing to get a new OS.

The problem for Microsoft is that they have nowhere to grow. Apple's M-chip computers are selling well. For the younger generation smartphones/tablets are their default. They have the business and gaming markets, but those are already saturated. But if they think they can increase the revenue through OEM fees by forcing a premature upgrade of non-obsolete hardware, I think they're really miscalculating.

People will simply not upgrade. Best case nothing happens from running unsupported and they don't get any money, worst case some bad exploits and bad PR. Apple must be loving that, if they can avoid pricing their entry level products out of the market they'll grab another big chunk of ex-Windows customers. And Linux is an okay desktop these days too, if you don't want either of those.

Nowicki Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
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Ive made the full adoption to windows 11 and figured out how to work around their simplification of the OS.

For all you techies who want original control panel options in windows 11

right click on the option like devices and printers, then click on open in new window. Now you have the old interface for that tool in windows 11 like it was in windows 10.

The Storage Spaces feature built into Windows allows you to combine multiple hard drives into a single virtual drive. It can mirror data across multiple drives for redundancy, or combine multiple physical drives into a single pool of storage. Storage Spaces is similar to RAID or LVM on Linux.

This feature was added in Windows 8, and was improved in Windows 10. It’s available on all editions of Windows 8 and 10, including Home editions.

Before you enter safe mode, you need to enter the Windows Recovery Environment (winRE). To do this, you will repeatedly turn your device off, then on:

1. Hold down the power button for 10 seconds to turn off your device.

2. Press the power button again to turn on your device.

3. On the first sign that Windows has started (for example, some devices show the manufacturer’s logo when restarting) hold down the power button for 10 seconds to turn off your device.

4. Press the power button again to turn on your device.

5. When Windows restarts, hold down the power button for 10 seconds to turn off your device.

6. Press the power button again to turn on your device.

7. Allow your device to fully restart. You will enter winRE.

8. Now that you are in winRE, you will follow these steps to take you to safe mode:

On the Choose an option screen, select Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Startup Settings > Restart.

fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1
fsutil behavior query disablelastaccess

You could set it to 1 (user) or 3 (system) to disable. //

In the System Managed mode, the NTFS driver can enable or disable the “Last Access” updates during the boot (in particular, when the system volume is mounted). The “Last Access” updates are enabled for NTFS volumes when the size of the system volume (which is usually mounted as the “C:” drive) is 128 GB or less. If the system volume is larger, then the “Last Access” updates are disabled.

In the User Managed mode, the status of the “Last Access” updates isn’t modified by the system during the boot. "Last Access" will stay enabled or disabled as you set. //

I put a Batch Script together if you think it will be of use . . .

fsutil behavior query
fsutil behavior set

 disablelastaccess {1|0}    

Disables (1) or enables (0) updates to the Last Access Time stamp on each directory when directories are listed on an NTFS volume.

You must restart your computer for this parameter to take effect.

6 Fixes to Anti Malware Service Executable High CPU Usage 2021

Method 1:

I would suggest you to perform a Clean Boot on the PC and check if that helps. Refer the article How to perform a clean boot in Windows. https://support.microsoft.com/en-in/help/929135/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows

Performing a clean boot will start the computer with minimal set of drivers and programs, to determine whether a background program is causing the issue. Some of the Startup programs will not load after performing a clean boot on the computer. However, that functionality will return when you reset the computer to start normally after finishing the troubleshooting.

Note: Please refer the section Reset the computer to start normally after clean boot troubleshooting to boot the computer in to normal mode after troubleshooting.

Method 2:

The error is mainly due to its Windows Defender real-time protection feature. Kindly follow the steps to change Windows Defender’s schedule to fix it.

1. Press Windows key + R. This will open Run. Alternatively, you can go to Start and search for Run.
2. In Run dialog box, type taskschd.msc and hit enter.
3. Navigate to Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > Windows Defender.
4. On the right hand pane, double-click on Windows Defender Scheduled Scan.
5. On the General tab, uncheck the option Run with highest privileges.
6. Click on Conditions tab and uncheck all the options.
7. Click on OK.